With the proliferation of portable electronic devices today, many users are migrating away from their reliance on paper-based products and handling their daily tasks with their electronic devices. For example, users read news, communicate with others (e.g. via electronic mail), manage their schedules, and read magazines using their portable electronic devices. Before the advent of portable electronic devices, handling these tasks would have required newspapers, letters, calendars, and magazines. However, when interfaced electronically, the visual information that was presented and communicated through pages and volumes of paper is distilled down to just one user interface—the display on the electronic device.
The size of the display is limited by the portability of the device because if the display becomes too large, the device will be too bulky or too heavy to be carried easily. Furthermore, even if the display could be made larger without adding significantly to the size or weight (for example, if the display were foldable), the display is unlikely to provide the amount of communication real estate that was covered by the newspapers, magazines, stationery, and calendars.
Hence, digital content providers are faced with the challenge of how to effectively provide all the desired information without cluttering up the user interface.